Friday, January 15, 2010

Swamped with press tour stuff (so swamped I'm not sure when I'll have time to watch and write about "Parks and Rec," so please save your comments until then), so very quick thoughts on last night's "Community" coming up just as soon as I grow up in a land without sun...

"We can do anything we want! It's Greendale!" -Jeff

For me, a little Jack Black(*) goes a long way, even when he's relatively dialed down like he was here as Buddy. But Black's presence allowed the show to do a nice job of examining the evolving dynamics of the study group, to show Jeff trying to be more Zen and Hawkeye-like in his approach to Greendale, and to portray the awkwardness of newcomers trying to join a well-established (if weirdly-established) group.

(*) Who starred in the Dan Harmon co-created "Heat Vision and Jack," one of the most famous (and weird) unsold comedy pilots of all time, about a former astronaut fighting crime with the help of his talking, sentient motorcycle. The motorcycle's voice? Owen Wilson, who made his surprise cameo at the end as the leader of the cool group.

There were still plenty of good jokes - Senor Chang's rap, Dean Pelton's stereotypical black guy voice, Pierce mistaking Shirley's voice for Troy's, Shirley pushing for her boring friend to join the group, and the tag with Abed and Troy and then Pierce auditioning for Starburns - but what I like is that, for all the show's meta references and sarcasm, there's a genuine heart and interest in character development that doesn't feel forced to me. I was just as happy with Abed explaining the other side of Hawkeye to Jeff as I was to see Senor Chang eat Annie's brains.

Couple of other quick thoughts:

• Note that Annie is very interested in transferring out of Greendale, as someone with her background and ambition would be. When we visited the set last week on the first day of press tour (which seems a lifetime ago), Dan Harmon said he had some ideas in mind for how and why these people might all stay together at Greendale without it seeming out-of-character. (He also reminded us that you can, in fact, get a bachelor's degree from a community college, so Jeff has no real reason to leave.)

• Also, speaking of Starburns, he's played by Dino Stamatopoulos, a writer whom Harmon originally brought in to consult on the show. Then he thought it would be funny to make him a background character in the Spanish class, and now Dino has to spend so much time on the set that Harmon almost never sees him to talk about the writing. Also, the Starburns sideburns were originally made by the hair and makeup department, but Dino eventually decided to grow them for real. So he walks around with them.

(Harmon had a bunch of good Starburns anecdotes. If I ever get home from this place and have time to transcribe the interview, I'll put up some of the better quotes in a future "Community" review.)

WOW i know you havent reviewed this weeks Modern Family but you basically didnt like the last 2 before this weeks, even calling the Christmas one lackluster. I think MF has been on fire, it's so amazing. I think this show is very uneven with soem good (christmas) some bad, but even so, I thought this episode was terrible and mostly due to Jack Black. But if you think this was good and the 2 Modern Family's not great I guess we are just on different wavelengths of what we think is good. Oh and by the way this show just cant be pop culture references every week, like with the MASH close yesterday. Use the pop culture a bit more spairngly.

Did the cast party too hard during the break, or enter some sleep-deprivation pact? Did the Community crew switch to the Dealbreakers HD cameras? Everyone looked terrible, especially the white characters. I could've swear that the production style has changed too. Were they using handheld cameras? Natural lighting? Whatever it was, it was bad. Señor Chang was the only one who came out okay.

That was "dialed down" Jack Black? Wow. I spent much of the show thinking that the story might have worked better (and perhaps even been funnier) if somebody less known was playing the part -- Black's shticky energy made the character way too cartoony for me.

Wow ... I thought that it was my television or some HD issue, because Jeff looked orange and Britta just looked odd. It seemed like they did change some camera settings, no? Otherwise this episode was brilliant.

I loved the detail behing Jeff's desk in the newspaper office - the encyclopedia was six volumes of the Funk & Wagnall's Encyclopedia that we used to see offered a volume at a time in '80s grocery stores. Four of them were Volume 1 (which was always introductory-priced at nine cents).

- in the beginning when he realizes that the group doesn't want a new member because they're so used to each other. Then.....as he's saying something like "You guys don't want me to ruin your rhyt..." and the opening credits interrupt him mid-word. I lost it at that......but then they came back and he finished his sentence and I thought it was great.

- "Paul Blart, Marll Cop....Mall Cop!"

He also seemed to be making Joel McHale genuinely laugh when he was first introduced at the table.

As someone who does find Black grating at times and that he's only great in small doses, I love that they acknowledge the most annoying attributes of Black (the singing, the kicking, etc)and incorporated it in such a great way into his character. Made for a really excellent guest star.

The crossword lines made me roar. Because I'm way into crosswords, and Alison Brie is my TV girlfriend (having recently supplanted Rashida Jones). However, my real girlfriend was not amused in the slightest.

It took about two lines from Jack Black for me to hate that character. Good writing or not?

One thing I've been wondering about is their choice to have the show run in "real" time. While this has worked for The Office (but is getting close to being unbelievable), it is going to become really hard to buy the characters still at Greendale in two to three years.

I think one thing that was lost is the group has a new potential rival group to compete against in the future. Of course half the group won't be shown becasue they are played by Jack Black and Owen Wilson, but it sounds like the other group is recruiting for new members anyway.

Yeah, the strength of the show has been the sense of them forming a real group, not just a bunch of people swapping jokes for 22 minutes.

Hard to describe, but I liked the structure of the episode, which felt looser and more inventive. The first half of the season was good but many of the emotional/serious hearts of the stories were structured in the same way. Here Jeff still learns a lesson, but it felt different.

I also loved the crossword line...a classic kind of joke and the way Alison Brie said it was hilarious.

The sheer overload of meta-humor continues to annoy, but I loved the deliberately hokey cliche of retconning Jack Black into footage from the first season's classroom scenes.